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Books: The Idea of Progress

J >> J.B. Bury >> The Idea of Progress




This indeed is not the tone of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. Voltaire's
optimism was always tempered with cynicism. But the idea of Progress
is there, though moderately conceived. And it is based on the same
principle--universal reason implanted in man, which "subsists in
spite of all the passions which make war on it, in spite of all the
tyrants who would drown it in blood, in spite of the imposters who
would annihilate it by superstition." And this was certainly his
considered view. His common sense prevented him from indulging in
Utopian speculations about the future; and his cynicism constantly
led him to use the language of a pessimist. But at an early stage of
his career he had taken up arms for human nature against that
"sublime misanthrope" Pascal, who "writes against human nature
almost as he wrote against the Jesuits"; and he returned to the
attack at the end of his life. Now Pascal's Pensees enshrined a
theory of life--the doctrine of original sin, the idea that the
object of life is to prepare for death--which was sternly opposed to
the spirit of Progress. Voltaire instinctively felt that this was an
enemy that had to be dealt with. In a lighter vein he had maintained
in a well-known poem, Le Mondain, [Footnote: 1756.] the value of
civilisation and all its effects, including luxury, against those
who regretted the simplicity of ancient times, the golden age of
Saturn.

O le bon temps que ce siecle de fer!


Life in Paris, London, or Rome to-day is infinitely preferable to
life in the garden of Eden.

D'un bon vin frais ou la mousse ou la seve
Ne gratta point le triste gosier d'Eve.
La soie et l'or ne brillaient point chez eux.
Admirez-vous pour cela nos aieux?
Il leur manquait l'industrie et l'aisance:
Est-ce vertu? c'etait pure ignorance.


To return to the Essay, it flung down the gage of battle to that
conception of the history of the world which had been brilliantly
represented by Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire universelle. This
work was constantly in Voltaire's mind. He pointed out that it had
no claim to be universal; it related only to four or five peoples,
and especially the little Jewish nation which "was unknown to the
rest of the world or justly despised," but which Bossuet made the
centre of interest, as if the final cause of all the great empires
of antiquity lay in their relations to the Jews. He had Bossuet in
mind when he said "we will speak of the Jews as we would speak of
Scythians or Greeks, weighing probabilities and discussing facts."
In his new perspective the significance of Hebrew history is for the
first time reduced to moderate limits.

But it was not only in this particular, though central, point that
Voltaire challenged Bossuet's view. He eliminated final causes
altogether, and Providence plays no part on his historical stage.
Here his work reinforced the teaching of Montesquieu. Otherwise
Montesquieu and Voltaire entirely differed in their methods.
Voltaire concerned himself only with the causal enchainment of
events and the immediate motives of men. His interpretation of
history was confined to the discovery of particular causes; he did
not consider the operation of those larger general causes which
Montesquieu investigated. Montesquieu sought to show that the
vicissitudes of societies were subject to law; Voltaire believed
that events were determined by chance where they were not
consciously guided by human reason. The element of chance is
conspicuous even in legislation: "almost all laws have been
instituted to meet passing needs, like remedies applied
fortuitously, which have cured one patient and kill others."

On Voltaire's theory, the development of humanity might at any
moment have been diverted into a different course; but whatever
course it took the nature of human reason would have ensured a
progress in civilisation. Yet the reader of the Essay and Louis XIV.
might well have come away with a feeling that the security of
Progress is frail and precarious. If fortune has governed events, if
the rise and fall of empires, the succession of religions, the
revolutions of states, and most of the great crises of history were
decided by accidents, is there any cogent ground for believing that
human reason, the principle to which Voltaire attributes the advance
of civilisation, will prevail in the long run? Civilisation has been
organised here and there, now and then, up to a certain point; there
have been eras of rapid progress, but how can we be sure that these
are not episodes, themselves also fortuitous? For growth has been
followed by decay, progress by regress; can it be said that history,
authorises the conclusion that reason will ever gain such an
ascendancy that the play of chance will no longer be able to thwart
her will? Is such a conclusion more than a hope, unsanctioned by the
data of past experience, merely one of the characteristics of the
age of illumination?

Voltaire and Montesquieu thus raised fundamental questions of great
moment for the doctrine of Progress, questions which belong to what
was soon to be known as the Philosophy of History, a name invented
by Voltaire, though hardly meant by him in the sense which it
afterwards assumed.

3.

Six years before Voltaire's Essay was published in its complete form
a young man was planning a work on the same subject. Turgot is
honourably remembered as an economist and administrator, but if he
had ever written the Discourses on Universal History which he
designed at the age of twenty-three his position in historical
literature might have overshadowed his other claims to be
remembered. We possess a partial sketch of its plan, which is
supplemented by two lectures he delivered at the Sorbonne in 1750;
so that we know his general conceptions.

He had assimilated the ideas of the Esprit des lois, and it is
probable that he had read the parts of Voltaire's work which had
appeared in a periodical. His work, like Voltaire's, was to be a
challenge to Bossuet's view of history; his purpose was to trace the
fortunes of the race in the light of the idea of Progress. He
occasionally refers to Providence but this is no more than a prudent
lip-service. Providence has no functions in his scheme. The part
which it played in Bossuet is usurped by those general causes which
he had learned from Montesquieu. But his systematic mind would have
organised and classified the ideas which Montesquieu left somewhat
confused. He criticised the inductions drawn in the Esprit des lois
concerning the influence of climate as hasty and exaggerated; and he
pointed out that the physical causes can only produce their effects
by acting on "the hidden principles which contribute to form our
mind and character." It follows that the psychical or moral causes
are the first element to consider, and it is a fault of method to
try to evaluate physical causes till we have exhausted the moral,
and are certain that the phenomena cannot be explained by these
alone. In other words, the study of the development of societies
must be based on psychology; and for Turgot, as for all his
progressive contemporaries, psychology meant the philosophy of
Locke.

General necessary causes, therefore, which we should rather call
conditions, have determined the course of history--the nature of
man, his passions, and his reason, in the first place; and in the
second, his environment,--geography and climate. But its course is a
strict sequence of particular causes and effects, "which bind the
state of the world (at a given moment) to all those which have
preceded it." Turgot does not discuss the question of free-will, but
his causal continuity does not exclude "the free action of great
men." He conceives universal history as the progress of the human
race advancing as an immense whole steadily, though slowly, through
alternating periods of calm and disturbance towards greater
perfection. The various units of the entire mass do not move with
equal steps, because nature is not impartial with her gifts. Some
men have talents denied to others, and the gifts of nature are
sometimes developed by circumstances, sometimes left buried in
obscurity. The inequalities in the march of nations are due to the
infinite variety of circumstances; and these inequalities may be
taken to prove that the world had a beginning, for in an eternal
duration they would have disappeared.

But the development of human societies has not been guided by human
reason. Men have not consciously made general happiness the end of
their actions. They have been conducted by passion and ambition and
have never known to what goal they were moving. For if reason had
presided, progress would soon have been arrested. To avoid war
peoples would have remained in isolation, and the race would have
lived divided for ever into a multitude of isolated groups, speaking
different tongues. All these groups would have been limited in the
range of their ideas, stationary in science, art, and government,
and would never have risen above mediocrity. The history of China is
an example of the results of restricted intercourse among peoples.
Thus the unexpected conclusion emerges, that without unreason and
injustice there would have been no progress.

It is hardly necessary to observe that this argument is untenable.
The hypothesis assumes that reason is in control among the primitive
peoples, and at the same time supposes that its power would
completely disappear if they attempted to engage in peaceful
intercourse. But though Turgot has put his point in an unconvincing
form, his purpose was to show that as a matter of fact "the
tumultuous and dangerous passions" have been driving-forces which
have moved the world in a desirable direction till the time should
come for reason to take the helm.

Thus, while Turgot might have subscribed to Voltaire's assertion
that history is largely "un ramas de crimes, de folies, et de
malheurs," his view of the significance of man's sufferings is
different and almost approaches the facile optimism of Pope--
"whatever is, is right." He regards all the race's actual
experiences as the indispensable mechanism of Progress, and does not
regret its mistakes and calamities. Many changes and revolutions, he
observes, may seem to have had most mischievous effects; yet every
change has brought some advantage, for it has been a new experience
and therefore has been instructive. Man advances by committing
errors. The history of science shows (as Fontenelle had pointed out)
that truth is reached over the ruins of false hypotheses.

The difficulty presented by periods of decadence and barbarism
succeeding epochs of enlightenment is met by the assertion that in
such dark times the world has not stood still; there has really been
a progression which, though relatively inconspicuous, is not
unimportant. In the Middle Ages, which are the prominent case, there
were improvements in mechanical arts, in commerce, in some of the
habits of civil life, all of which helped to prepare the way for
happier times. Here Turgot's view of history is sharply opposed to
Voltaire's. He considers Christianity to have been a powerful agent
of civilisation, not a hinderer or an enemy. Had he executed his
design, his work might well have furnished a notable makeweight to
the view held by Voltaire, and afterwards more judicially developed
by Gibbon, that "the triumph of barbarism and religion" was a
calamity for the world.

Turgot also propounded two laws of development. He observed that
when a people is progressing, every step it takes causes an
acceleration in the rate of progress. And he anticipated Comte's
famous "law" of the three stages of intellectual evolution, though
without giving it the extensive and fundamental significance which
Comte claimed for it. "Before man understood the causal connection
of physical phenomena, nothing was so natural as to suppose they
were produced by intelligent beings, invisible and resembling
ourselves; for what else would they have resembled?" That is Comte's
theological stage. "When philosophers recognised the absurdity of
the fables about the gods, but had not yet gained an insight into
natural history, they thought to explain the causes of phenomena by
abstract expressions such as essences and faculties." That is the
metaphysical stage. "It was only at a later period, that by
observing the reciprocal mechanical action of bodies hypotheses were
formed which could be developed by mathematics and verified by
experience." There is the positive stage. The observation assuredly
does not possess the far-reaching importance which Comte attached to
it; but whatever value it has, Turgot deserves the credit of having
been the first to state it.

The notes which Turgot made for his plan permit us to conjecture
that his Universal History would have been a greater and more
profound work than the Essay of Voltaire. It would have embodied in
a digested form the ideas of Montesquieu to which Voltaire paid
little attention, and the author would have elaborated the intimate
connection and mutual interaction among all social phenomena--
government and morals, religion, science, and arts. While his
general thesis coincided with that of Voltaire--the gradual advance
of humanity towards a state of enlightenment and reasonableness,--he
made the idea of Progress more vital; for him it was an organising
conception, just as the idea of Providence was for St. Augustine and
Bossuet an organising conception, which gave history its unity and
meaning. The view that man has throughout been blindly moving in the
right direction is the counterpart of what Bossuet represented as a
divine plan wrought out by the actions of men who are ignorant of
it, and is sharply opposed to the views, of Voltaire and the other
philosophers of the day who ascribed Progress exclusively to human
reason consciously striving against ignorance and passion.

CHAPTER VIII

THE ENCYCLOPAEDISTS AND ECONOMISTS

1.

The intellectual movement which prepared French opinion for the
Revolution and supplied the principles for reconstituting society
may be described as humanistic in the sense that man was the centre
of speculative interest.

"One consideration especially that we ought never to lose from
sight," says Diderot, "is that, if we ever banish a man, or the
thinking and contemplative being, from above the surface of the
earth, this pathetic and sublime spectacle of nature becomes no more
than a scene of melancholy and silence ... It is the presence of man
that gives its interest to the existence of other beings ... Why
should we not make him a common centre? ... Man is the single term
from which we ought to set out." [Footnote: The passage from
Diderot's article Encyclopedie is given as translated by Morley,
Diderot, i, 145.] Hence psychology, morals, the structure of
society, were the subjects which riveted attention instead of the
larger supra-human problems which had occupied Descartes,
Malebranche, and Leibnitz. It mattered little whether the universe
was the best that could be constructed; what mattered was the
relation of man's own little world to his will and capacities.

Physical science was important only in so far as it could help
social science and minister to the needs of man. The closest analogy
to this development of thought is not offered by the Renaissance, to
which the description HUMANISTIC has been conventionally
appropriated, but rather by the age of illumination in Greece in the
latter half of the fifth century B.C., represented by Protagoras,
Socrates, and others who turned from the ultimate problems of the
cosmos, hitherto the main study of philosophers, to man, his nature
and his works.

In this revised form of "anthropo-centrism" we see how the general
movement of thought has instinctively adapted itself to the
astronomical revolution. On the Ptolemaic system it was not
incongruous or absurd that man, lord of the central domain in the
universe, should regard himself as the most important cosmic
creature. This is the view, implicit in the Christian scheme, which
had been constructed on the old erroneous cosmology. When the true
place of the earth was shown and man found himself in a tiny planet
attached to one of innumerable solar worlds, his cosmic importance
could no longer be maintained. He was reduced to the condition of an
insect creeping on a "tas de boue," which Voltaire so vividly
illustrated in Micromegas. But man is resourceful; [words in Greek].
Displaced, along with his home, from the centre of things, he
discovers a new means of restoring his self-importance; he
interprets his humiliation as a deliverance. Finding himself in an
insignificant island floating in the immensity of space, he decides
that he is at last master of his own destinies; he can fling away
the old equipment of final causes, original sin, and the rest; he
can construct his own chart and, bound by no cosmic scheme, he need
take the universe into account only in so far as he judges it to be
to his own profit. Or, if he is a philosopher, he may say that,
after all, the universe for him is built out of his own sensations,
and that by virtue of this relativity "anthropo-centrism" is
restored in a new and more effective form.

Built out of his own sensations: for the philosophy of Locke was now
triumphant in France. I have used the term Cartesianism to
designate, not the metaphysical doctrines of Descartes (innate
ideas, two substances, and the rest), but the great principles which
survived the passing of his metaphysical system--the supremacy of
reason, and the immutability of natural laws, not subject to
providential interventions. These principles still controlled
thought, but the particular views of Descartes on mental phenomena
were superseded in France by the psychology of Locke, whose
influence was established by Voltaire and Condillac. The doctrine
that all our ideas are derived from the senses lay at the root of
the whole theory of man and society, in the light of which the
revolutionary thinkers, Diderot, Helvetius, and their fellows,
criticised the existing order and exposed the reigning prejudices.
This sensationalism (which went beyond what Locke himself had really
meant) involved the strict relativity of knowledge and led at once
to the old pragmatic doctrine of Protagoras, that man is the measure
of all things. And the spirit of the French philosophers of the
eighteenth century was distinctly pragmatic. The advantage of man
was their principle, and the value of speculation was judged by its
definite service to humanity. "The value and rights of truth are
founded on its utility," which is "the unique measure of man's
judgements," one thinker asserts; another declares that "the useful
circumscribes everything," l'utile circonscrit tout; another lays
down that "to be virtuous is to be useful; to be vicious is to be
useless or harmful; that is the sum of morality." Helvetius,
anticipating Bentham, works out the theory that utility is the only
possible basis of ethics. Bacon, the utilitarian, was extolled like
Locke. [Footnote: The passages quoted on utility are from d'Holbach,
Systems de la nature, i. c. 12, p. 224; c. 15, p. 312; Diderot, De
I'interpretation de la nature in OEuvres, ii. p. 13; Raynal,
Histoire des deux Indes, vii. p. 416. The effectiveness of the
teaching may be illustrated from the Essay on Man, by Antoine
Rivarol, whom Burke called the Tacitus of the Revolution. "The
virtues are only virtues because they are useful to the human race."
OEuvres choisis (ed. de Lescure), i. p. 211.] As, a hundred years
before, his influence had inspired the foundation of the Royal
Society, so now his name was invoked by the founders of the
Encyclopaedia. [Footnote: See d'Alembert's tribute to him in the
Discours preliminaire.]

Beneath all philosophical speculation there is an undercurrent of
emotion, and in the French philosophers of the eighteenth century
this emotional force was strong and even violent. They aimed at
practical results. Their work was a calculated campaign to transform
the principles and the spirit of governments and to destroy
sacerdotalism. The problem for the human race being to reach a state
of felicity by its own powers, these thinkers believed that it was
soluble by the gradual triumph of reason over prejudice and
knowledge over ignorance. Violent revolution was far from their
thoughts; by the diffusion of knowledge they hoped to create a
public opinion which would compel governments to change the tenor of
their laws and administration and make the happiness of the people
their guiding principle. The optimistic confidence that man is
perfectible, which means capable of indefinite improvement, inspired
the movement as a whole, however greatly particular thinkers might
differ in their views.

Belief in Progress was their sustaining faith, although, occupied by
the immediate problems of amelioration, they left it rather vague
and ill-defined. The word itself is seldom pronounced in their
writings. The idea is treated as subordinate to the other ideas in
the midst of which it had grown up: Reason, Nature, Humanity,
Illumination (lumieres). It has not yet entered upon an independent
life of its own and received a distinct label, though it is already
a vital force.

In reviewing the influences which were forming a new public opinion
during the forty years before the Revolution, it is convenient for
the present purpose to group together the thinkers (including
Voltaire) associated with the Encyclopaedia, who represented a
critical and consciously aggressive force against traditional
theories and existing institutions. The constructive thinker
Rousseau was not less aggressive, but he stands apart and opposed,
by his hostility to modern civilisation. Thirdly, we must
distinguish the school of Economists, also reformers and optimists,
but of more conservative temper than the typical Encyclopaedists.

2.

The Encyclopaedia (1751-1765) has rightly been pronounced the
central work of the rationalistic movement which made the France of
1789 so different from the France of 1715. [Footnote: The general
views which governed the work may be gathered from d'Alembert's
introductory discourse and from Diderot's article Encyclopedie. An
interesting sketch of the principal contributors will be found in
Morley's Diderot, i. chap. v. Another modern study of the
Encyclopaedic movement is the monograph of L. Ducros, Les
Encyclopidistes (1900). Helvetius has recently been the subject of a
study by Albert Keim (Helvetius, sa vie et son oeuvre, 1907). Among
other works which help the study of the speculations of this age
from various points of view may be mentioned: Marius Roustan, Les
Philosophes et la societe francaise au xviii siecle(1906); Espinas,
La Philosophie sociale du xviii siecle et la Revolution (1898);
Lichtenberger, Le Socialisme au xviii siecle(1895). I have not
mentioned in the text Boullanger (1722-1758), who contributed to the
Encyclopaedia the article on Political Economy (which has nothing to
do with economics but treats of ancient theocracies); the emphasis
laid on his views on progress by Buchez (op. cit. i. III sqq.) is
quite excessive.] It was the organised section of a vast propaganda,
speculative and practical, carried on by men of the most various
views, most of whom were associated directly with it. As has well
been observed, it did for the rationalism of the eighteenth century
in France much what the Fortnightly Review, under the editorship of
Mr. Morley (from 1868 to 1882) did for that of the nineteenth in
England, as an organ for the penetrating criticism of traditional
beliefs. If Diderot, who directed the Encyclopaedia with the
assistance of d'Alembert the mathematician, had lived a hundred
years later he would probably have edited a journal.

We saw that the "solidarity" of the sciences was one of the
conceptions associated with the theory of intellectual progress, and
that the popularisation of knowledge was another. Both these
conceptions inspired the Encyclopaedia, which was to gather up and
concentrate the illumination of the modern age. It was to establish
the lines of communication among all departments, "to enclose in the
unity of a system the infinitely various branches of knowledge." And
it was to be a library of popular instruction. But it was also
intended to be an organ of propaganda. In the history of the
intellectual revolution it is in some ways the successor of the
Dictionary of Bayle, which, two generations before, collected the
material of war to demolish traditional doctrines. The Encyclopaedia
carried on the campaign against authority and superstition by
indirect methods, but it was the work of men who were not sceptics
like Bayle, but had ideals, positive purposes, and social hopes.
They were not only confident in reason and in science, but most of
them had also a more or less definite belief in the possibility of
an advance of humanity towards perfection.

As one of their own band afterwards remarked, they were less
occupied in enlarging the bounds of knowledge than in spreading the
light and making war on prejudice. [Footnote: Condorcet, Esquisse,
p. 206 (ed. 1822).] The views of the individual contributors
differed greatly, and they cannot be called a school, but they
agreed so far in common tendencies that they were able to form a co-
operative alliance.